I’ve spent decades coaching startup CEOs and teaching STEM researchers how to commercialize technology. I’ve watched brilliant engineers build things nobody wanted and mediocre thinkers stumble into exits because they understood people. So when I tell you the most dangerous degree in America might soon be a Bachelor’s in Computer Science, I need you to understand — I’m not being provocative for sport.
I’m being provocative because I’m right.
The Punchline Nobody’s Laughing At
Here’s what happened while computer science departments were celebrating record enrollment: AI learned to code.
Not “kind of” code. Not “assist with” code. Code. Claude, GPT, Copilot — pick your poison — they write functional software, debug it, refactor it, and they do it without complaining about the ping pong table in the break room or asking for equity. A computer science degree has traditionally been a four-year, six-figure ticket to writing instructions that machines execute. But now the machines are writing their own instructions. That’s not disruption. That’s an extinction-level event for a particular kind of job.
What a CS Degree Actually Teaches
Let’s be honest about what four years of computer science gets you. You learn data structures, algorithms, systems architecture, and enough math to feel superior at parties. You learn how to build things. Syntax. Frameworks. Design patterns.
You know what you don’t learn? Whether to build things. Or for whom. Or why.
And that “why” question? That’s the whole ballgame now.
When I was a turnaround CEO, I never once walked into a failing company and found that the problem was bad syntax. The code compiled fine. The architecture was often elegant. The company was dying because nobody had asked a fundamental question that any second-year philosophy student would have raised in the first ten minutes: What problem are we actually solving, and does anyone care?
The Philosophy Major’s Revenge
For forty years, philosophy majors have endured the same joke at Thanksgiving: “So… what are you going to do with that?” The answer, increasingly, is: everything the computer science major used to do, plus the part the CS major was never trained for.
Philosophy teaches you to think about thinking. It teaches you to construct and deconstruct arguments, to identify hidden assumptions, to reason about ethics, to grapple with ambiguity — which, if you haven’t noticed, is basically the job description for anyone working with AI rather than being replaced by it.
Consider what the AI economy actually demands:
Prompt engineering is just applied epistemology. You’re constructing precise linguistic frameworks to elicit desired outputs from a system you don’t fully understand. Descartes would have been employee of the month.
AI ethics isn’t a nice-to-have anymore — it’s a regulatory and existential necessity. Companies need people who can reason about bias, fairness, autonomy, and unintended consequences. You don’t learn that in Data Structures 301. You learn it reading Kant. Or Rawls. Or spending a semester arguing about the trolley problem until you want to throw yourself under one.
Strategic thinking — the ability to frame problems, question assumptions, and reason through second and third-order effects — that’s what executives actually get paid for. It’s what I coach CEOs to do. And it’s what philosophy departments have been quietly teaching for centuries while everyone snickered about baristas.
The Uncomfortable Math
Here’s a thought experiment from my I-Corps classroom. I ask researchers: “If your technology disappeared tomorrow, who would cry?” Most of them stare at me like I just insulted their mother.
Now apply that question to a computer science graduate in 2026. If your ability to write Python disappeared tomorrow — but was instantly replaced by an AI that writes better Python, faster, for free — who would cry? Your employer? They’d throw a party. They just eliminated a $140,000 salary plus benefits.
Now ask the same question about someone who can look at that AI-generated code and determine whether it should exist. Whether it creates liability. Whether it solves a real human need. Whether it’s going to land the company on the front page of the Times for all the wrong reasons.
That person is not replaceable by a large language model. That person might have a degree in philosophy.
Before the CS Crowd Comes for Me
I can already hear the keyboards clacking. “But Glen, someone still needs to understand the fundamentals!” Sure. Just like someone still needs to understand combustion engines. We call those people mechanics, and they’re wonderful, and they don’t make what software engineers make.
I’m not saying computer science is useless. I’m saying it’s being commoditized, and commoditized skills don’t command premium salaries. The CS graduates who will thrive are the ones who pair their technical knowledge with the kind of critical reasoning, ethical awareness, and strategic thinking that philosophy departments have been teaching all along.
The ones who can only code? They’re in a salary negotiation with a machine that works for pennies per hour and never takes a sick day.
The Real Education for the AI Age
As an executive coach, I work with founders who need to make decisions under radical uncertainty with imperfect information and competing stakeholder interests. That is not an engineering problem. That is a philosophical one.
The AI age doesn’t need more people who can write code. It needs more people who can think clearly about what code should do, interrogate the assumptions baked into algorithms, communicate complex ideas to non-technical humans, navigate ethical gray areas where there’s no correct answer in the back of the textbook, and ask “why” five times before anyone starts building anything.
That’s a philosophy education. That’s also, not coincidentally, what the best CEOs I’ve coached have in common — not a shared alma mater, but a shared habit of rigorous, uncomfortable questioning.
The Punchline
Twenty years ago, if your kid said they were majoring in philosophy, you started mentally budgeting for their extended stay in your basement. If they said computer science, you started pricing boats.
The boats are getting repossessed. The philosophy major just got promoted to Head of AI Strategy.
I’m not saying burn your CS textbooks. I’m saying maybe — just maybe — pair them with some Aristotle. Because the machines are coming for the “how.” The only defensible position left is the “why.”
And that’s not a bug. That’s a feature.
